How Obama's peace plan went 'poof'

Over chicken wings back at the hotel after the official dinner the king of the Netherlands hosted at the start of their trip to Europe last month, President Barack Obama, Secretary of State John Kerry and national security adviser Susan Rice tried to figure out how to save the peace process.

They met again that Friday en route to Riyadh on Air Force One, looking for an answer. That weekend, Kerry rushed back to Jerusalem with a decision: Time to float Jonathan Pollard.

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To agree to a peace framework, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas wanted a fourth, and controversial, group of prisoners released. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wanted enough concessions to get the release approved by his cabinet.

To keep the Palestinians at the table, Kerry needed to keep the Israelis at the table, so he and his team did something that no American official had, over the many times that Israelis had asked for Pollard’s release — they discussed it, according to a source familiar with the talks. And, once that news had leaked, the United States acknowledged the discussion, with all the risk that entailed.

Instead, two days later, the process had gone “poof,” as Kerry later put it to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Obama and his aides felt they’d learned from the failure of previous presidents’ peace process attempts — and their own in the first term — and were determined not to make the same mistakes.

The Pollard gambit capped off months of stumbling into others.

And it encapsulated how the latest American peace attempt that’s consumed the last nine months went wrong: Kerry, confident he could get through to Netanyahu and warning that Abbas was getting older and with a waning grip on power, was determined to get some kind of agreement, however small. Obama, while staying in touch privately with Kerry, wasn’t talking about the issue publicly — and then when he did, his timing and his reluctance to get more invested inadvertently caused even more trouble.

Smaller-scale talks have continued since Kerry, declaring “reality-check time,” left the region. But the mood is clear: The Israeli government is running out of interest. The Palestinian government is tired of not having its bigger demands met. Americans are frustrated, to the point of giving up.

At best, the latest deterioration has meant the last year was a waste of time and effort. At worst, it’s escalated and accelerated precisely the kind of breakdown that Obama and Kerry were trying to avoid, with all the parties feeling spurned at exactly the time when many experts on the region agree time’s running out.

Now, the administration is left managing yet another collapse — including the question of exactly how to describe that collapse, to keep alive the possibility of coming back to the process in the future.

Even among senior Obama aides, there’s disagreement about how wary the president actually was all along about taking another shot at the peace process, how much distance he was really trying to keep, and how much of his actions were about humoring an ambitious Kerry’s swing at the history books.

But six weeks ago, the Obama administration made a public show of the president’s involvement: Oval Office meetings with Netanyahu and Abbas, summits with the kings of Jordan and Saudi Arabia, an interview raising expectations for Israelis. Though administration officials now try to distance themselves from a late February New York Times story detailing the president’s moves to step up his personal role, at the time, one said that “now is a very timely opportunity for him to get involved.”

Obama appeared to be wrapping his arms around the process at the final stage. But according to interviews with American, Israeli and Palestinian officials, he was in reality desperately trying to give it a shove — or, depending on whom you ask, already administering CPR.

In January, Kerry and special Middle East peace envoy Martin Indyk latched onto the idea of a framework as an intermediate step to keep conversations going. Not an agreement, and not binding, the document was supposed to be the simplest possible statement of shared intentions. What U.S. officials didn’t anticipate was how few of those big questions the Israelis and Palestinians would be willing to leave out.

“Secretary Kerry and Ambassador Indyk thought it would be an effective tool, worth trying, but it was not going to be deciding the final status issues,” said a senior State Department official. “What they discovered is that the framework would actually require extensive decision-making about final status issues.”

Then, in late February, after all that careful calculation about when and how to deploy Obama, the plan they went with inadvertently increased tensions — and by keeping private the details of what people familiar with them say were actually somewhat successful negotiations, left the parties without political cover either at home or internationally.

Kerry and Netanyahu talked constantly, mostly by video conference — up to several times a week, with some calls lasting as long as three hours. Abbas doesn’t have the technological infrastructure in his West Bank office to handle the video calls, but Kerry tried to spend an equal amount of time with him, by phone and in person.

But Netanyahu was coming to Washington in March to speak at the American Israel Political Action Committee conference, which meant a White House visit. And given the looming prisoner release scheduled for March 29, and the late April negotiations deadline, administration officials felt they needed to bring Abbas in to the Oval Office, too, to keep the balance.

“There was very much an agreement in early March that we knew the end of the month would be a pivotal time, and it was a point where it was appropriate and effective for the president to be engaged in a public way,” said a source close to the talks.

By stepping into a more public role, Obama was trying to make clear that Kerry wasn’t freelancing and had his full support — trying to make it harder for them to say no, since that would now mean turning down Obama himself.

“It was a signal and a message to the parties that the president personally was interested to see this process move forward,” said Maen Areikat, Palestinian ambassador to the United States.

But the president stopped far short of a summit, a weekend at Camp David, or any other high-profile engagement that would have set him up for bigger embarrassment if things went wrong.